To the Editor:
Your readers might be interested in a letter I recently wrote to the late Mr. Benjamin Franklin. He has of course been deceased for over 235 years now, but it was a formidable mental exercise that gave me the chance to connect with a man whose spirit continues to live on to this day.
* * * * * * *
Dear Mr. Franklin,
Pardon me for disrupting your peaceful slumber, sir; if you grant me a brief moment of your eternal time, I’ll inform you of some things and then let you get back to what you were doing. Please allow me to introduce myself by saying that it’s currently the year 2025, and the letter you’re now reading was written in the same year by a citizen of the United States of America: the country you helped create, which is still very much alive—roughly 100 years ago, a peculiar congressman by the name of Lucas M. Miller proposed a constitutional amendment renaming the USA to the USE (United States of Earth), but as you can tell by my introduction, some attempts to “form a more perfect Union” didn’t quite make the cut—thanks to its enduring patriotism, which was sparked, in my opinion, by you, sir, when at 16 you pretended to be a middle-aged woman who had lost her husband. Three centuries after Mrs. Dogood won the hearts of many Bostonian suitors, I seldom leave home without holding in my hand a clothbound collection of all the instances where you put pen to paper and exercised your freedom of thought: an instruction manual for fostering the American community; whenever I encounter a situation unfamiliar to me, I flip through the pages of your “scribbles” and, more often than not, find a moment in time when you came across a similar challenge, and used it as an opportunity to illuminate minds across the colonies.
At this point, you’re surely curious about my identity: I’ll choose to leave it concealed, so my ideas can stand on their merits; but having some background on the author would add a touch of humanity to an otherwise stone-cold world of correspondence, and in that aim I’ll happily reveal that by modern American society’s standards, I’m young. Barely a man of 26 (though married, so by Richard Saunders’ definition, a “compleat man”), an age which up until recent generations meant solidifying your vocation and placing the heaviest of your community’s burdens on your shoulders, the preceding generations closest to my own appear reluctant to put anything but the lightest of feathers on my back and the backs of my brothers. I recognize that I may be getting ahead of myself by writing this and proposing to carry a heavier load, particularly because I’ve, in my short lifetime, already herniated the same disc in my low back twice, and I’m setting myself up for a lumbosacral trifecta, but it’s my generation’s time to take the reins, and my fragile spine is a sign that I’m an old soul. Having grown up in a calm, spacious town in a territory foreign to you when you passed but today represents one of our 50 United States (we expanded westward), I went through the motions of adolescence, completing my requisite schooling while constantly searching for a larger purpose, until graduating university and entering the public sphere; when the rules set by my college no longer applied to me and I watched its rigid framework for existence fade away, I began to wonder about the nature of my country’s government, and upon asking myself such trivial questions as, “what gives certain citizens the authority to make laws in the United States that the rest of us have to follow?” I discovered that the answer to that and many others was “a more meaningful civic life,” and your days on this Earth have been an inspiration to me ever since. You taught me that curiosity and a good conscience can be used at any age in the pursuit of public good, and that sitting on your hands expecting others, even older and wiser men, to build the society you wish to live in is a fool’s errand; my back may break, but I’ll proudly call this republic my own.
Hopefully you’ve learned enough about me to make sense of the intention behind this letter, which I’ll now clarify: though I don’t expect to one day open my mailbox and discover an envelope bearing your name, I nevertheless consider this to be a conversation through time that will bring your genius to the present moment, and help a young man carry on your legacy; quips at obscure lawmakers aside, I myself refuse to live a life where I don’t bring the United States closer to the principles in the Constitution’s Preamble. Indeed, when you and the other Founding Fathers (you can thank the 29th President for popularizing such a reverent title for you and your revolutionary brothers) came together after a gruesome war under the common purpose of developing the institution I now call my country, you all wielded enough influence in the republic’s early stages of existence to define for yourselves its ends and means; at this point, the American establishment oftentimes feels so solidified that its current members merely function within the constraints outlined by those alive and of political significance in 1787. Your era may have been more perilous, but it was also more fun! Now we have multiple instances of senators (I count 10 at least) who took to heart Poor Richard’s Almanack where you wrote, “Here comes the Orator! With his Flood of Words, and his Drop of Reason,” and gave speeches lasting more than 12 hours in length, without relieving themselves, in an often futile effort to halt legislation they didn’t like; whereas you encouraged men to pray together every morning to resolve disputes, today’s elected officials would rather forsake their bladders. But our Constitution can be amended, and if that means endlessly pacing around my study consumed in thought, and filibustering my wife to avoid my household chores, so I can conjure up transformative ideas, then I’ll put my nation first and shape this institution like the potters who threw the clay that became the plates I never cleaned.
As it’s my turn now to provide direction for our country, I’ve determined without a doubt in my mind that it’s in dire need of a revival; some argue that members of the republic need to channel their inner Plato or Rousseau to bring back some notion of proper public discourse, but I’d much rather look to the man who had a dialogue with his own gout, and compiled a list of over 200 different ways to call someone drunk. The United States needs another Benjamin Franklin, now more than ever; many inventions have advanced civilization since you passed, and I’m afraid the traditions that defined our country are becoming lost arts. On one hand, less than 200 years after my Fathers built a free society with unprecedentedly few restrictions on human ambition in a capitalist system, several of our own managed to set foot on the Moon as a result of our technological innovation; but as I’ve grown older, I’ve also watched, and been influenced by, rhetoric that’s slowly devolved from courageous remarks that stand the test of time to atrocious barbs that do nothing but convince one half of the American population to hate the other, at a rate proportionate to man’s attention shifting from dense volumes of centuries-old works to the next alert on the nearest phone screen (please don’t ask me to explain that one to you, as it would more than double the length of this letter; just go along with me). You introduced humanity to the freest thinking possible, and that’s what’s made this country so extraordinary: nowhere else do we have a firsthand account, in real time, of a group of independent statesmen debating how we should live a good life, making it up as they go along, never doubting their intellectual vitality, and proving that history is determined by the minds of great men who abide by no rules except those of natural law; may we all emulate your strengths. You taught us that a new perspective on old traditions is an invention in itself: you outlined the moral character of an experienced chess player, sketched the human anatomy to prove that man was “destined to drink wine,” used the English language to thoroughly describe the way various movements of the mouth and tongue produce certain sounds in the English language, and formed a club for “mutual improvement” through regular discussions and essays about sharpening minds and bettering mankind. While our beloved philosophers engaged in the relentless pursuit of truth, you revealed the beauty in American thought, and that did more to build a nation than any recitation of ancient wisdom; you may have been put to rest, but your spirit will outlast that of any man whose pen didn’t strike a tender heart with heartfelt laughter and a deep sense of gratitude. I’d like for my pen to do the same. I am, dear sir, your most obedient humble servant, and a
CITIZEN IN PROGRESS.